Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Volume 18
|
Issue 1 Article 2
1993
Refective Practice in Teacher Education
John Smyth
Flinders University of South Australia
Tis Journal Article is posted at Research Online.
htp://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol18/iss1/2
Recommended Citation
Smyth, John (1993) "Refective Practice in Teacher Education," Australian Journal of Teacher Education: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 2.
DOI: 10.14221/ajte.1993v18n1.2
Available at: htp://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol18/iss1/2
Allstraliall JOllrnal of Teacher Edllcatioll
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in action: The 'practical' dimension in Botswana
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---
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Allstraliall JOllmal of Tencher Edllcatioll
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE IN TEACHER EDUCATION
John Smyth
Flinders University of South Australia
INTRODUCTION
In this paper I want to raise four issues:
1. Why the interest in reflective approaches,
now?
2. What is to be gained from this approach?
3. What are some of the advantages?
4. What are the drawbacks?
The basic argument of the paper is that the notion
of "reflective practice" has generally had a
positive history and connotation in schools, and
that it is worth persisting with, but unless we
develop some touchstone principles to guide us
as to what it means to act reflectively, there is a
distinct danger that a constructive and useful
approach will be "at risk" as good ideas are
appropriated by governments for other ends -
ones that are not necessarily in the interests of
students or teachers.
I want to conclude by canvassing some of the
principles that might underlie a re-assertion of
what it is that is fundamentally important about
reflective approaches.
WHY THE INTEREST?
There are a number of major changes occurring
across a range of professions and professional
groups that are having a profound impact on the
shape and nature of professional knowledge.
Perhaps the major factor has been the breakdown
of traditional forms of production (the so-called
Fordist notions) and their replacement with much
more flexible forms of specialisation, and ways of
responding to customers and clients. With the
dramatically increased speed of communication
and the new micro-technology, it is now much
easier for capital to move around so as to take
advantage of global comparative advantage.
The effect of this has been that rigid, centralised
forms of production are no longer the most
appropriate. We have a dramatically changed
sets of conditions. Donald Schon (1991) captured
the essence of these changes for education when
he indicated that disciplined-based forms of
knowledge, which in the past had been used to
try and construct grand theories of the way the
world works, are no longer relevant. What we
have in their place, are much more locally-based
theories that recognise the idiosyncrasies of site-
specific circumstances, and that acknowledge the
integrity and worth of knowledge won by people
at the workface. This represents a major shift in
the centre of gravity of knowledge. The view that
there are particular elite groups in our society
whose responsibility it is to develop knowledge
for and on behalf of others, has endured for a long
time (and even now is only dying slowly in some
quarters). What characterises these new locally-
based approaches is the much more negotiated
(even devolved) ways, in which the people who
do the work are given a much more significant
stake in it. As 8chon (1991) put it in his most
recent work, what we have is a "reflective turn",
in which practitioners are allowed to give voice to
the reasons that lie behind what they do. What
this means, essentially, is that of us in
universities and other educational agencies have
to grapple with a changed role for ourselves -
namely, how to work with practitioners in
assisting them to observe and describe what it is
they do, and with what effect. Schon (1991) put it
in terms of "exploring tile llnderstandings revealed by
the patteJ'1ls of spontaneOllS nctic>ity that 11Iake IIp
practice" (p.5). Our role, therefore, becomes one of
helping insiders to l11ake scnse of experience, often in
quite strange and puzzlingly new sets of
circumstances - rather than telling them what
these experiences ought to look like.
This is quite a different emphasis to the past
where "practice" was regarded mainly as a field
of application, where ideas were developed by
someone else (who usually wore the label of
theorist or policy maker), then exported back to
the field of practice to be implemented. The
emphasis in the reflective approach is upon
practitioners being assisted to theorise their own
accounts of practice, and how they might use that
as a springboard for action. What this change
does is turn the world dramatically on its head.
The issue is not "what is best for practitioners to
do", but rather "what do practitioners need to
know, and what do they already know or
understand that might help them gain those
insights?". Herein lies the really interesting (and
daunting) aspect to the reflective turn - there is no
uniform approach!!
Allstm/illn jOllrllll/ of TCllchcr Edllcation
WHAT IS TO BE GAINED?
Perhaps of most significance for me in this
reflective turn, is the opportunity it provides for a
genuine shift in power over who determines wha t
counts as knowledge. The move is from a
deterministic (one might even say, a patriarchal
"father knows best" mentality), to one in which
there is considerable scope for genuine dialogue
about the nature of work. There can be little
doubt that this is occurring in contexts (not
always altruistic), but in which there is at least a
modicum of understanding (albeit heavily tinged
with self-interest), that knowledge about work-
practices actually does inhere at low levels within
organisations. This startlingly simple dictum
comes as a major revelation to some groups and
individuals.
In speaking of this I am reminded of an incident
from David Halberstam's novel "The Reckoning"
(the story of the economic battle between the
titans of the car industry, Ford of Detroit and
Nissan of Japan). Hal Sperlich, an executive of
Ford, on one of his visits to Japan in the early
1970s, noticed that there were no repair bays in
which to shunt cars that were defective and in
need of fixing:
"Where do YOlll'epllir YOllr cars?" Spcl'liclJ IIsked
the engineer with him.
"We don't hllvc to rcpllir 0111' Cllrs, " the engineer
IInswered.
"Well, then" Sperlichllsked, ",l'hcre IIrc YOllr
inspectors? "
"The workers IIrc the inspectors," his guide
IInswered.
(Halberstam, 1986, p.716)
This little example makes the point rather nicely
that things are different. It is not that there has
been a wholesale capitulation to workplace
democracy, so much as a shift in the nature of
social control over work. Workers as "reflective
practitioners" has been a central part of that
redefinition. Whatwe are coming to experience is
a ml/ch less direct, overt slIrveillllnce over work, and
111 11 ch 11I0re indirect f01'11IS of control through devices
such as team work, partnerships, collaboration,
quality circles, total quality management, and the
like. What has come to characterise these
approaches, at least in industry where they are
receiving a lot of attention at the moment, is not
that they are fundamentally committed to worker
democracy (although they may sometimes give
the appearance that this is the case). Rather, they
are about shifting the axis of control through
ninety degrees - from vertical and bureaucratic
forms, to more lateral, horizontal and, I might
add, humane forms of work relations. In this
regard, let's make no mistake, the new set of work
relations are a shift decidedly for the better.
In schooling reflective approaches are but one
manifestation of the more general post-Fordist
shift in the nature of work that is occurring
generally. It may be that schools over the past 10-
15 years, through various collaborative
approaches to curriculum development and
reflective ways in which teachers have analysed
their work, have been considerably ahead of the
game elsewhere.
As a way of arriving at a considered position in
which we are able to be clear about what is worth
retaining in reflective approaches to teaching,
there are certain matters we need to be mindful of
it we are not to finish up in a situation in which
reflection can mean anything anybody wants it to
mean. Being aware of the advantages and
drawbacks may be an important part of the
process of deciding what is worth fighting for and
persevering with.
SOME OF THE ADVANTAGES
1. The kind of knowledge-base that is being
developed through reflective approaches, is
much more comprehensive because it is
directly tuned into what workers actually
know about the work.
2. Because the knowledge-base emerges out of
what workers know, it provides the
opportunity for rapid and progressive re-
focussing - a quali ty tha t is impera tive in this
new era of flexible specialisation;
3. Workers' ideas and beliefs are listened to
much more attentively in the reflective
approach than under the Fordist regimes, in
which those higher up in the organisation
were deemed to know best. Fortunately, this
bureaucratic view of knowledge is on the
wane, although it has by no means
completely disappeared. The effect of this
new approach has been to uplift worker's
self-esteem and morale;
4. Strategic planning within the organisation is
able to be much more grounded in a realistic
sense of what is feasible, practicable and
workable. The people who generate the
ideas are seen as having a concrete stake in
their successful implementation;
5. What becomes important is not that
knowledge is a product, so much that it is a
process by which a workforce continually
keeps itself up-to-date. When an
organisation equips itself to become an
"educative organisation" it is able to harness
the very considerable reservoir of talent and
energy invested in its workforce. Self-
energising, self-renewing organisations, we
know, are ones that are also more successful.
Taken together these are a package of
features that have important and far-
reaching consequences for the way
neophytes are inducted into a range of
professions, and for the kind of practical
experiences they receive in their educational
programs. I know this to be particularly the
case in my own field of teacher education.
These were ideas rehearsed in Minister
Beazley's (1993) recent statement on teacher
education entitled, appropriately, Tellching
COl/lltS. To that end it is worth briefly
amplifying the relevance of reflective
approaches to teaching and teacher
education:
1. It is clear that the views of practising
teachers and the theories that underpin their
work, will play a much larger part than they
have in the past, in the way teachers of the
future are educated;
2. This presents those of us in teacher
education with a significant new challenge-
how to develop robust school-based and
school-focussed ways of working that avoid
the unfortunate aspects of the
apprenticeship model we left behind several
decades ago;
3. The thrust towards competency-based
teacher education which has received a lot of
publicity (although in this post-Mabo
context of some States vigorously re-
asserting their rights Federal initiatives are
no longer a foregone conclusion), must be
seen as an opportunity for us to engage with
schools in the re-definition of what the
notion of competency means 011 tellchers'
tel'11Is. We need to regard this as a means by
which to capture and publicly assert the
complexity of teaching, by working with
teachers to better articulate how it is that
reflective teachers make sense of their work.
Allstl'l7/il1ll JOllrHll/ of TCl1chcr EdllClltiOIl
In doing that we need to struggle hard
against the entrenched and simplistic views
that still abound as to what constitutes
teaching. What we need is some sharply
focussed public re-education of the rightful
(but much more limited) role of teachers,
based on evidence gleaned from carefully
researched instances of competent practice;
4. By elevating the status of teachers as
informed, articulate, and reflective theorists
of their own work, we need to struggle to
head off impositions by outsiders as to what
they misguidedly think teaching is or ought
to be. There are some ill-informed views
about on what constitutes teaching, and we
need to robustly confront those;
5. If we embrace, rather than reject outright,
some of the policy initiatives being
trumpeted by government, then perhaps we
might have a chance of being able to shape
what teacher education might look like in
the 21st century. If we walk away from it,
then it will be shaped for us, and what we
see may not be a pretty sight.
WHAT ARE THE DRAWBACKS?
I certainly don't want to give the impression that
everything is "sweetness and light" with the
reflective approach to knowledge generation -
that is far from the case. Indeed, there are some
quite substantial dangers that can, if we are not
careful, turn reflective approaches into another
"iron case". When I hear governments singing
the virtues of what might be gained through
becoming reflective (as is happening at the
moment), I become sllspicious. Governments
never give up power, no matter what it might
look like on the surface!! Indeed, when
governments start talking about schools being
more "autonOlTIOUS", "self-managing" and
"reflective" as they are at the moment, I have this
overwhelming impulse to reach for my "crap
detector" (to use Garth Boomer's phrase).
It is becoming clear that the shift to reflective
practice is occurring in contexts in which there are
moves away from direct, prescriptive forms of
surveillance and control, towards more
autonomous and indirect methods (see Smyth,
1993). For example, we are hearing a lot about
teaching increasingly being defined in terms of
"co-operation", "temTIwork" and "partnerships"
as teachers are urged to display "collegiality",
and work as part of groups and teams in the
policy making and decision making process in
schools.
Austmliall Journal afTeacher Educatioll
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Lawn and Jenny Ozga (1986, p. 226) in the
UK use an interesting analogy in which they
borrow the term "indirect rule" from British
colonial administration, as a way of
characterising what is happening at the moment.
Drawing from that earlier historical period, they
point to "the appearance of dcccntralisation and
devolution, with a quasi-autonolllous rolc for the
'natipes' which ensured their co-optio1l, whilc the
lIIajor powers of gove/'1llllcnt rClllaincd firlllly in
British hands".
Within education this has taken the form of what
appears to be the gradual withering away of
central control and the dismantling of educational
bureaucracies, and in its place a process that is
much more reliant on engineering broad forms of
consensus. Lawn and Ozga (1988, p. SS) note that
as with the colonial experience, emancipation is
only for parts of the system - it does not mean
endangering "real tactical control", but rather
dispensing with some of the more burdensome
aspects of unnecessary central power.
My point here is that we need to be careful about
schemes that preach about reflective approaches,
because they may in substance be little different
from the traditional approaches they replace. Let
me see if I can illustrate this through four of the
difficulties I have with reflective approaches:
First, there is something commonsensical, natural,
almost indisputable about the suggestion that
teachers should be thoughtful and reflective
about their work. Jean Rudduck (1984, pp. 5-6)
argues that the debilitating effect of teaching
itself, makes it imperative that teachers keep on
their toes. In her words:
What teaching is vulncrable to is the ,t7attening
oflwbit. Habit is seducti"uc: it is sootizing,
lIOn-productive and anxiety free... Good
teaching is essentially cxperi11lental and
experi11lent entails rcscuing at least part (:f onc's
workfro11l the predictability of routine ... Not to
exa11linc one's practice is irresponsible: to regard
teaching as an experi11lent and to 11I0nitor onc's
peliorll/ance is a responsible professiolwl act.
Put in these sort of terms, what starts out as a
process intended to liberate teachers from the
drudgery of habit leaves open the possibility of
being turned back on them and used as a way of
ensuring conformity to narrow and instrumental
ways of construing teaching. To not act according
to some undefined canons of reflectivity can be
tantamount to gross dereliction of duty. Who
could possibly be against reflection; it's an
indisputable notion like "quality" and
"excellence". Herein lies it's major problem.
My secol1d problem is that reflection can mean all
things to all people, and because it is used as a
kind of umbrella or canopy term to signify
something that is good or desirable to do in
respect of teaching, it runs the real risk of being
totally evacuated of all meaning. Everybody has
their own (usually undisclosed) interpretation of
what reflection means, and they use that as the
basis for enunciating the virtues of it in a way that
makes it sound as virtuous as motherhood.
What occurs is a kind of conceptual colonisation
in which terms like reflection have become such
an integral part of the educational jargon that to
not be using it is to run the real risk of being out
of educational fashion. Everybody climbs aboard
under the flag of convenience and the term is
used to describe anything at all that goes on in
teaching. What is not revealed is the theoretical,
politicd, and episte11lological baggage people bring
with them.
Hugh Munby and Tom Russell (1989, p. 76) for
example, argue that Lee Shulman's work on
reflection lies within an undeclared "technical
rntionlllitY1110dcl of knowledge prodllction and IIse"
and that his language gives away his "cogllitive
processfra11lcwork". To take an even more concrete
example, the Holmes Group Report (Holmes
Group, 19S6), on teachers and teacher educators
in the USA, also argues the importance of having
reflective teachers if schooling is to improve and
the economy undergo the supposed necessary
revitalisation. But, apart from mouthing the
words, it is clear from the report that the only
kind of reflection that is to occur is that which
conforms to an undisclosed preferred model of
reflection that is inextricably connected to state
and national guidelines on what constitutes
acceptable qualities and standards of good
teaching, and with teachers being subjected to
increased forms of surveillance and appraisal.
The same can be said of our own NBEET Schools
Council's (1990) Australia's Teachers: An Agcl1dafor
the Next Decade. It is replete with instances that
exhort teachers to be "reflective", but in a
particular constrained way - one that conforms to
community values. In the words of Kevin Crowe
(1993, p. 6) in the inaugural issue of Teaching and
Teachers' Work, the report puts the view that
teachers should be less inflexible, less intellectual,
rely less on unscientific craft-type knowledge, be
less wedded to outmoded work practices, mind
their manners more, be polite, punctual and serve
well. The problem with our schools, so the report
tells us" is that teachers are out of sync with
community expectations and values, and that the
solution is that teachers mllst be more reflective
on how they can achieve a IICZl' ('allle COIIseIlSIlS.
One of the proposed ways of doing this, we are
told, is for each school to develop a "Charter for
Teaching" in which teachers will justify to parents
the value of what they teach. Because schooling
costs so much, and because the gap between the
views of teachers and the wider community is so
large, teachers are the problem, and they need to
be re-tooled (perhaps through being taught "key
competencies"?). The difficulty, of course, with
arguments of this kind is that they break down
precisely because they are: (a) not founded on
evidence - rather, persistent assertion; and (b)
they are predicated on solutions to the fabricated
problem which is seen as lying in the creation of a
more docile, compliant teaching force - one that is
reflective of (and upon) a perceived consensus of
community values.
My third (and not unrelated) difficulty is that
processes like reflection that give the outward
appearances of modernity and teacher autonomy,
can in fact be used as rhetorical flourishes and a
very effective cover with which to acquire even
greater control over teachers. As French post-
structuralist Michel FOl1cault (1980) argues, the
centres of power in contemporary society have
become even more remote and the svstem of
surveillance even more The
surface appeal of appearing to be democratic and
empowering belies the deeper manipulative
intent. There is very real risk with reflective
approaches of providing what Wayne Ross and
Lynne Hannay (1986, p. 11) call a "detailed step-b)l-
step" process that reifies a technical linear
approach to problem solving, at the expense of
failing to upset or at least uncover "the SYStc111 11 lid
institlltions that created the proble111 ill thefirst place".
Proced uralising reflection in this kind of linear
way, leaves the way open to appropriating the
language of enlightenment, while perpetrating
the practices of instrumentalism by constraining
teachers to operate within il particular
paradigmatic framework of teaching.
My claim is that all of this goes considerably
beyond conceptual confusion. If we stop and
look at the way in which the term reflection has
evolved from largely ind ivid uillistic/
psychologistic origins, then perhaps we can come
a little closer to understanding what is occurring.
By illdje'idllalising the pro/Jle111 (:f "quality" and
"excellence" in education by leaving it to
Australillll 'oul'Illll o(Tcllchcr EduClltioll
illdi('idllai teachers to reflect on their practice,
what we are doing is handing them is an
instrument which manv will turn on themselves
in the hopeless for what's wrong with
education. By labelling the problem in this way
(i.e., the need for teachers to be more reflective
about teaching) we have nicely quarantined the
problem. Portraying the problems confronting
educational institutions as if they were due in
some measure to a lack of competence on the part
of teachers and as if they were resolvable by
individuals (or groups of teachers), is to
effectively divert attention away from the real
st1'llctllral proble111s that are deeply embedded in
social, economic and political inequalities. Rather
than empowering teachers, what individual
reflective processes actually do is to send teachers
on guil t trips in the vain search for the alchemists'
equivalent of the philosopher's stone. In effect,
"the pr0111ise of' rcscarch illto teacher effecti,'cness
which d0111inaft:d the sixties and Sl'l'clltics appears 1I0W
to have bel'li cxhausted" (Martinez, 1989, p.3) and
has been replaced by reflective processes by
teachers.
My fOllrth (and final) problem is that the kind of
reflection likely to have most appeal to many
teachers is one grounded in pragmatism, and we
know that forms of reflection that place stress on
'relevance' can easily lack a wider social
awareness of conseque;1Ces and fail to face up to
and reflect on the value issues involved. As
Andrew Pollard (1987, p. 58-9) argues, we need
"to lillk the personal experiences of indit'idll17ls witiz
social, ccon0111ic and political st1'lfctllrcs and trcnds"
within which those practices occur.
CONCLUSION
As a way of drawing together some of the points
I have made in this paper, there are six key
principles that ought to underpin reflective
practice, and that might be useful to dwell upon.
While each of these might be extracted from the
more positive aspects of our encounters with
reflective approaches up to this point, we need to
be especially mindful of them if we are to avoid
the situation in which reflection can mean
anything we want it to mean:
1. Reflection should not to be restricted to
examining only teciznical skills; it should
equally be concerned with the etizical, social,
and political context within which teaching
occurs;
AlIstraliall /ollnIal Of Tracltcr EdllCt1tioll
2. Reflection should not be restricted to
teachers rct1cctilw indipidualllj upon their
teaching' there to be a and
collabor;tive dimension to it as well;
3. Reflection is a process that is centrally
concerned with c1li711cllgillg the dominant
nlljths, assumptions alld hiddell message
systems, implicit in the way teaching and
education are currently organised;
4. Reflection is also fundamentally about
creating improvements in educational practice,
and the social relationsilips that underlie those
practices;
5. Reflection is founded on the belief that
knowledge about teaching is in a tentative alld
incomplete state, and as such, is continually
being modified as a consequence of practice;
6. Reflection occurs best when it begins witil tile
experiences of practitioners as they are assisted
in the process of describing, informing,
confronting and re-constructing their theories
of practice (Smyth, 1992).
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Beazley, K. (1993). Teaching COllnts. A Ministerial
Statement. Canberra: Australian Government
Publishing Service.
Crowe, K. (1993). Re-defining the profession: the
approach of a government policy docun;ent to
teachers in Australia. Teaching and Teachers Work,
1(2).
Foucault, M. (1980). Micilel Foucauit:
Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Otiler
Writings. C. Gordon (Ed.). New York: Pantheon.
Halberstam, D. (1986). The Reckoning. New York:
Avon.
Holmes Group. (1986). Tomorrow's Teachers: A
Report of the Holmcs Group. East Lansing, MI.
Lawn, M. & Ozga, J. (1986). Unequal partners:.
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Sociolog1J of Education, 7(2), 225-38.
Lawn, M. & Ozga, J. (1988). the educational
worker? A reassessment of teachers. In Ozga,].
(Ed). Schoolwork: approaches to tile Labour Process
of Teaching. Milton Keynes: Open University
Press.
Martinez, K. (September, 1989). Critical
Reflection in Teacher Education. Paper to the
Teacher Education Practicum Conference
Rockhampton. '
Munby, H. & Russell, T. (1989!. Educating the
reflective teacher: An essay reVIew of two bOoks
by Donald Schon. Journal of Curricululll StlJdies,
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Note: Some of the ideas in this paper had their
genesis in my "Teachers' and the politics of
reflection" American EducatIOnal Research JOl
29(2),1993, pp. 267-300 that receive? t!1e
O. Johnson Award for the most dIstl11g
contribution to educational research published
the American Educational Research Association
in 1992.
Allstraliall JOllnInl o(Teaclier EdllCtltioll
11 WASN'T AWARE, UNTIL I WAS AWARE': TEACHING GENDER EQUITY
TO SECOND YEAR EDUCATION STUDENTS
Lesley Newhouse-Maiden and Susan Cull en
Edith Cowan University
ABSTRACT
The study sought to ascertain the success of a pre-
service unit in which one module focussed on
developing 'gender fair' attitudes in education
students. The subjects of the study were students
in their second year of a Bachelor of Ed uca tion
degree studying the 'Social Justice and Equity in
Schools' unit. Collaborative action research
methods were used to collect da ta over a three
1110nth period. It was found that 85'1., of students
attempted to use gender fair approaches and
material when observed on teaching practice.
While the outcome of pre-service teacher
education was positive, it was acknowledged that
there was always the problem of achieving
effective change in their future role as prJctising
teachers in a loosely coupled, conserva tive
education system.
INTRODUCTION
The issue of gender and schooling has received
intermittent attention over the past 16 years in
Australian schools. Little is known of the success
of pre-service courses focussed on the creation of
'gender fair' attitudes and predispositions. In the
module 'Gender Equity', we sought to address
the issues of girls in purportedly masculine
subject areas, the problem of limited career paths
and inequalities in the classroom.
The 1990 second year Education Studies unit for
pre-service teachers was entitled 'Social Justice
and Equity in Schools and Society'. Critical
theory was taught alongside specific modules on
equi ty. Issues rela ted to the Aboriginal,
multiculturalism and gender were addressed.
The text was Understanding Schooling by Henry et
al. (1988) and eminently suitable for the unit.
The unit was planned on a three modular
sequence so that during the course of the semester
we taught three distinct groups, each in a four
week block of time. This was a fortuitous
arrangement from the point of view of
conducting collaborative action research. Our
research proceeded through the action research
spiral of planning the first module run,
monitoring and discussing each session,
reflecting, rethinking, evaluJting and modifying
as appropriate for the two repeats of the module
(Kemmis, quoted in Oja and Smulyan, 1989: 19).
According to these writers, action research
involves
the application the tools and lIIethods social
science to illllllcdiate practical problellls with the
goals of contributing to thl'Ory IIlld knowledge in
the field of education and illlprouing practicc in
sclz;Jols. .
We had three general aims in the gender equity
action research:
1. Our own professional development as
lecturers in the area of gender equity.
2. Improved school practice as a result of
educating our students in the module and
subsequent practice in the schools.
3. Modifications to and elaboration of theories
of teaching and learning in gender inclusive
curriculum in university and schools.
Our paper begins with an explanation of the
philosophy underlying the unit, and details the
issues we address while engaged in action
research. Finally we discuss the findings of our
data collection.
The compulsory Education Studies unit enabled
us to raise issues of sexism and gender inequity.
The lectures focussed on cultural limitations faced
by girls. The conditions were set
renegotiating knowledge in the classroom WIth
the emphasis placed on 'democratisation' of the
curriculum, classroom management, classroom
interaction, preferred learning styles, resources
and career education. The module was based on
Social Feminism, a philosophy defined by Jagger
and Struhl (1978: 225) as
Social FClllinist theory (if society is characterised
171/ IIn emphasis on the inextricable
il"zterconnectedness of hO!lle and work, private
and public, persona( and political, fll III ily and
econo!llic system, wO!llen's oppression and class
society. Tt attempts to synthesize the important